Ill-Gotten Gains

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Actions have consequences. It is troubling that the British taxpayer is to pay millions in compensation to 16 former Guantánamo Bay detainees. Regardless of the wrongs these men have suffered, their number includes some who are the unabashed and evangelistic enemies of the system which has tied itself in knots to give them justice. It is obscene that they will now become rich at its expense, but this situation has not arisen from nowhere. It is a consequence.

The al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 — by agents with a fundamentalist motive and of no particular state — put